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6 Books You’d Find on Ms. Frizzle’s Dream Curriculum
Nearly all of us have a favorite teacher from our youth—someone who worked relentlessly to help you reach your potential, someone who opened your eyes to new possibilities, someone who shrink-rayed you and sent you careening into your classmate’s lower intestine.
That last one will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever hopped aboard Ms. Frizzle’s Wild Ride, or, as you might remember it, The Magic School Bus. Public school used to be so different. It used to be appropriate not only to turn students into bees and krill, but also to bake them into pies or, on the rare occasion, float them down a river of molten lava. (Hypothesis: the people who used to write up waivers for the Department of Education cut their teeth at Muppet Labs in the days of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s Exploding Clothes™.)
But even the Frizz had her limits. One imagines they were budgetary restraints, vehement objections from the PTA, page counts, and TV running times. It does lend itself to a question, though: what does Valerie Frizzle teach on the days she’s forced to stay in the classroom? And what would her textbooks be? Here are our best guesses.
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Cosmos, by Carl Sagan
The sky’s the limit, right? Well, The Frizz bows to no man or scientific concept, though surely she doffs her eccentric hat to Sagan for his seminal text examining our cosmic existence. There are a number of field trips to mine here, but let’s be real: Frizzle’s teaching this in preparation to take her troops straight to the Big Bang, probably without the appropriate protective outerwear. Or, if she’s feeling frisky, she’ll turn them all into trilobites during the Cambrian explosion. It’s a toss-up.
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The Origin of the Species, by Charles Darwin
Yes, we know, Phoebe, you never had to struggle for existence against other organic species at your old school. Your old school was lame…and OSHA certified.
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A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
“Well, class, wouldn’t it be fun to see what happens inside a black hole? Wrong answer! Yes, it would!” I imagine this comes up because Wanda’s trying to do a report on Hawking and asks a question about some concept, only to immediately regret her decision.
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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach
Oh, like she’s above it. Frizzle has only nearly killed her students on more occasions than you could shake an iguana at, including that time she abandoned them in the middle of outer space. The only reason the bus never stopped at a morgue was because ethical lessons about human death are hard to impart in a 25-minute TV show. I, for one, long to hear the puns Carlos comes up with when they learn about cadavers used as crash test dummies.
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The Pluto Files, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Remember that time Arnold took off his helmet on Pluto and froze his entire head only to somehow survive? I’m betting that was the actual inspiration for this book.
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
This is Frizz catnip—scientific inquiry with a healthy dose of cultural anthropology and greater lessons. It also gives her the chance to test her students’ resistance to endemic diseases. We are going to examine genomes and, despite all odds, we are going to find Arnold’s lacking. As much as you wish it were only Janet suffering, it’s important we acknowledge it is going to also happen to Arnold. Everything happens to Arnold.